by Bruce | June 3, 2019 | Articles, Business Models, Compensation, Cultural Considerations, Finance, Leadership, Marketing, Partnership Structures, Strategy
We have never subscribed to the belief that law firms operate in a fundamentally undifferentiated industry—that each law firm competes with every other law firm—and that given the magic alignment of expertise, cost, and personal rapport, clients’ choice of law firms...
by Bruce | May 31, 2019 | Articles, Business Models, Finance, Leadership, Technology strategy
Eight years ago, Marc Andreessen wrote that “software is eating the world.” Notably, he wasn’t specific about what geographies it had already consumed and where it was going next. Today I’d like to suggest that whether this software feast is...
by Bruce | May 9, 2019 | Articles, Business Models, Finance, Leadership, Partnership Structures, Practice Group Management
We have written before about the profession’s seeming disconnect between how people perceive the typical law firm, in terms of lawyer career-level distribution, and reality. The perception, from history, is that of a relatively small number of partners on top...
by Bruce | April 1, 2019 | Articles, Business Models, Cultural Considerations, Finance, Globalization, Latin America, Leadership, M&A, Practice Group Management, Strategy
Last week I spent three full days in Bogota, meeting with firms and colleagues, giving a talk at the always-wonderful “Gun Club,” and generally trying to soak up as much market intelligence as I could. Although I’ve been to Bogota several...
by Bruce | March 15, 2019 | Articles, Business Models, Cultural Considerations, Finance, Leadership, Strategy
AT&T’s long-delayed acquisition of Time Warner finally closed some days ago, and within about a week The Wall Street Journal put out a front-page story “It was once ‘game of thrones’ inside Time Warner: AT&T said, enough.” What...
by Bruce | January 30, 2019 | Articles, Cultural Considerations, Finance, Ineffable, Just Plain Interesting, Leadership, Strategy
My title for today steals literally from Ronald Coase’s legendary 1937 paper of the same name, which gained Coase the Nobel in Economics in 1991. The paper, barely over a dozen pages long, asks the question, childlike in its simplicity, “why do firms...
